The PlayStation Vita is coming to Japan this year, and USA and Europe sometime in early 2012.
Sony

Sony finally has announced the true battery life of its next-generation PlayStation Vita handheld entertainment device.

Sony held a press conference today during the Tokyo Game Show detailing many aspects of the highly anticipated successor to the PlayStation Portable. The Vita is capable of 3 to 5 hours of gaming, 5 hours of video playback, and 9 hours of music playback (in standby mode) via the 2,200 mAh battery. These figures are based on the brightness used for the device's default settings (I assume that's somewhere in the middle), Bluetooth disabled, and Wi-Fi not being used; altering those features will affect the battery life accordingly. To fully recharge the battery from 0 percent will take 2 hours and 40 minutes.

The battery life of the Vita is somewhat similar to the Nintendo 3DS, which is 3 to 5 hours of playtime with the 3D effect turned on, and up to 8 hours of original DS game playback.

We have hit on the main specifications of the Vita before in a previous post, but as a reminder, it has an OLED screen, ARM Cortex-A9 quad-core processor, SGX543MP4 + GPU, 512MB of RAM, and 128MB of video RAM. This is on top of a slew of other built-in goodies such as front and rear cameras, speakers, microphone, accelerometer, gyro-sensor, GPS, Wi-Fi, and a version with 3G. Read more in CNET's hands-on review of the Vita by editor Jeff Bakalar.

Sony made several other revelations today that are exclusive to Japanese consumers. The company announced that the Vita will launch there on December 17, and NTT DoCoMo will be the primary carrier for 3G service (980 yen for 20 hours, or 4,980 yen for 100 hours of usage).

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Crave contributor Christopher MacManus regularly spends his time exploring the latest in science, gaming, and geek culture -- aiming to provide a fun and informative look at some of the most marvelous subjects from around the world.
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